


blaze in the dark

by Anonymous



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, Polyamory, Pseudo-Romantic Rivals to Pseudo-Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28632249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “This is the worst matchmaking set-up ever,” Chaewon says.
Relationships: Jeon Heejin/Kim Hyunjin/Park Chaewon | Go Won, Kim Hyunjin/Park Chaewon | Go Won
Comments: 17
Kudos: 52
Collections: Anonymous





	blaze in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> what? anonymous author posting yet again in the loona tag with a title from evermore? you betcha. idk how this happened tbh.
> 
> title from ivy, this time around.
> 
> !v important: the scenes here are narrated in reverse chronological order!

  
  
  


“This is the worst matchmaking set-up ever,” Chaewon says. 

Hyunjin frowns, adjusts the couch cushion between them. Outside, the sky gets darker, sun setting as if telling Hyunjin that they’re running out of time. Heejin arrives soon—perhaps they are. The minute changes when Hyunjin glances at her phone, and she tilts it away, lets the searing glare reflect off her screen and block the numbers from her sight. 

“You think so?” Hyunjin asks. She doesn’t have to. This is Chaewon’s way of dealing with things: bathe everything in cold sarcasm, in dry nonchalance. How she maintains her perfectly manicured image of unearthliness. 

Chaewon’s counter comes sharp. “You don’t?”

“I don’t really have a gauge to base if off of.” Hyunjin shrugs. She looks down and picks at the seam of her jeans for something to do; Chaewon’s gaze burns as if she was still stealing Hyunjin’s breath from her lungs. Hyunjin swipes at her own bottom lip. “Do you?”

Chaewon scoffs. In the corner of her vision, Hyunjin sees it all. Chaewon fixing her hair, smoothing her blouse; removing every trace of Hyunjin, back to that clean, immaculate facade. Hyunjin cracks her knuckles so she doesn’t surge forward and mess it all up again. 

Desperation bubbles in Hyunjin like the gas in her forgotten soda, lukewarm on the coffee table in front of her. She does not swallow it down. “Was this a mistake?”

She finally looks at Chaewon. Hyunjin is admittedly not prepared; Chaewon’s brows are furrowed and she gnaws on her bottom lip, as if Hyunjin has some semblance of an effect on her. The space between them turns into a chasm. Hyunjin almost wants to close her ears, to never hear Chaewon’s response—to live perpetually in the Schrodinger’s box they patched together for themselves. 

“I don’t know yet,” is Chaewon’s reply, the most honest Hyunjin’s ever heard her. 

  
  
  
  


Chaewon studies the piece of merchandise she’s just picked off the shelves, views it from all its angles. “What about this one?” she asks. 

Beside her, Hyunjin comes closer. Chaewon resists the urge to sidestep, to bring the mini replica of the weapon in that anime Heejin watches between them, poorly guised barrier. 

“She has another of those already,” Hyunjin replies. 

This is the fifth time Hyunjin has denied a suggestion from Chaewon, and Chaewon starts to feel the backs of her eyes burn. Chaewon is not beyond thinking this is sabotage of some sort—Hyunjin dangling her superior knowledge of Heejin’s taste before her. As if saying, _you’ve got a long way to go._

Chaewon is left with little choice, though; this is her first time spending Heejin’s birthday, and sometimes being in a relationship with Heejin feels like taking a test. As if every action Chaewon takes towards her is meticulously graded and filed away, tucked in a corner of her inscrutable brain. 

Hyunjin tugs on her wrist, and Chaewon jumps at the contact, her calloused fingers on her soft skin. “Come on,” she says, head tilted, “I have an idea.”

She’s pulled to the apparel section, shelves upon shelves of T-shirts and jackets and baseball caps. Chaewon had been avoiding this area because—

“This’ll seem like I barely put any thought into it,” she tells Hyunjin. 

Hyunjin beams. “That’s the point.”

Chaewon bites her tongue, bites back the fight she already knows she’s about to pick. 

“If you buy something that requires, like, _extended_ knowledge,” Hyunjin says, eyes softened at the edges, “she’ll know that I helped you out. This way, she thinks you bought it all by yourself, because—”

Chaewon picks out a cap with the first familiar face she sees and crumples it in her hands. Her steps are heavy as she walks to the cashier, and she just wants this over with, doesn’t like how tired she is, how much she’s been fussing over this gift, how _right_ Hyunjin is, how seen she feels.

The next week, when Heejin exhales _Oh, Chae, I love this so much, thank you,_ and leans in to kiss her, Chaewon spares Hyunjin a split second glance, sees her smiling and gesturing a thumbs up, mouthing, _Nice._

When Heejin kisses her, Chaewon prays she doesn’t taste the ash of guilt in her mouth. 

  
  
  
  
  


The sound of the door unlocking drives Hyunjin up from her bed. 

Heejin and Chaewon stumble into the room, ruined makeup and noisy steps. Hyunjin switches on the lights and helps Heejin out of her heels, the dexterity required impossible to ask of a person who’s in the state Heejin is. 

“Is she always like this?” Hyunjin hears a soft voice whisper. Chaewon.

Hyunjin replies, “Only around this time of year,” craning her neck to face her. There’s an odd seriousness in Chaewon’s expression that Hyunjin finds decidedly uncharacteristic. “I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

Heejin groans and Hyunjin’s attention returns to her. She picks her up, carries her to the bedroom. Hyunjin had already laid out Heejin’s sleepclothes, fully expecting this: already memorises the shape of Heejin’s uncoordinatedness and dresses her down with relative ease. 

When she goes back out to switch off the lights, Hyunjin finds Chaewon by the kitchen, struggling to unzip her dress. And she doesn’t know what possesses her, only knows that in the next moment, she’s asking—

“Want some help?”

Chaewon ceases her efforts and turns to face Hyunjin. Hyunjin watches as Chaewon wrestles with the idea, eyes darting and mouth twisted. This is something Hyunjin has noticed: Chaewon’s hesitance to let people in, her endeavoured unwillingness to show a crack in her porcelain-perfect lacquered shell. 

Hyunjin watches carefully as Chaewon drops her arms. She sighs and relents, “Sure.”

A smile makes its way onto Hyunjin’s face. Hyunjin doesn’t know if it’s for her own sake or Chaewon’s that it does. Hyunjin moves forward in careful, thoughtful steps, positions herself behind Chaewon. Chaewon gathers up her hair, and Hyunjin unzips her dress. 

Hyunjin wants to blame her throat going dry on something. She struggles, reaches for a reason—finds nothing but post-midnight dread that mocks her. When Chaewon lets go of her hair, it falls into place perfectly, as if it was never handled at all, and Hyunjin is reminded, unkindly, of the first time she saw Chaewon. Delicate and pretty, as if Heejin was telling her, _Look, Hyun, she’s everything you’re not. She’s everything you can’t give me._

Chaewon’s newly exposed skin is flushed, but when Hyunjin’s hand accidentally brushes against it, it feels tens of degrees warmer than it should be. Feverish, fiery hot. 

“Thanks,” Chaewon says, and turns around. Her sleeves hang loose around her shoulders, and Hyunjin’s hand curls into a fist. 

Chaewon looks straight at Hyunjin when she asks, “Can I stay the night?”

Hyunjin inhales and bites the inside of her cheek. Thinks that she’s never loathed Chaewon’s unreadability more than in this moment. 

“Sure,” she replies. 

  
  
  
  
  


Chaewon meets Heejin’s girlfriend in a coffee shop. 

She recalls Heejin’s voice over their call. _You two should get to know each other!_ she’d exclaimed, then, _And talk about how obsessed you two are with me. Record it so I can listen to it when I feel like shit._

Her eyes roam, struggling in the breakfast rush and noise. Eventually she finds her, a semi-familiar face her brain manages to recognise via pictures on Heejin’s phone and Chaewon’s own stalking of her social media, seated near the pick-up bar. 

Hyunjin looks up when Chaewon’s only a few steps away. “Hi!” she greets, smile wide on her face, her cheeks and the skin below her eyes softer than Chaewon would have ever imagined. 

“Hello,” Chaewon says, bowing before taking a seat. 

The first thing Hyunjin asks is, “Is it okay that we met here? It’s just—it’s easiest for me to get to class from here.”

Chaewon waves a hand. “It’s alright.”

Hyunjin smiles again. “Cool.”

Chaewon gets a better look at Hyunjin now, relaxed in her seat. A thought occurs to her, something like, _Of course this is what Heejin’s girlfriend looks like_. Hyunjin’s in a school sweater and a beanie, all charming handsomeness. Chaewon fights the urge to squirm. Wonders how Heejin managed to look at anyone else. This is the kind of person that should first come to mind when Jeon Heejin tells people she’s seeing someone—not Chaewon. 

“What’s your usual? On me,” Hyunjin tells her, holding up her wallet. Her gaze on Chaewon is—so clean, she thinks. No feigned civility out of courtesy toward her girlfriend. She must be like this, if she has no qualms about Heejin catching feelings for someone else and then acting on them. 

Before all of this, Chaewon remembers that she still felt the pull of moral consciousness to feel bad, stepping into a world built without her in mind. But Jeon Heejin—magnetic, attractive, object-of-Chaewon’s-dreams Jeon Heejin—is a woman who doesn’t stop until she gets what she wants.

“Um.” Chaewon purses her lips. “Americano.”

“Great!” Hyunjin stands up, sound of metal scraping on concrete as she pushes her chair back. “Well, then—I’m in your care, Park Chaewon-ssi,” she says, body bent in full bow. 

Chaewon wonders: _are you really?_

“And I’m in yours,” is Chaewon’s reply. 

**Author's Note:**

> or: op hates that there’s no accurate, non-clunky translation of 잘 부탁드립니다 in english


End file.
